Connecting mere Christianity with contemporary culture and (most often) with mainstream science in order to discover a flourishing faith

Monday, August 07, 2017

The Science of Gratitude

U.C. Davis psychologist Robert Emmons has studied the science of
gratitude. In his very approachable book entitled Thanks, Emmons tells about a study he and a research team conducted
with participants whom he divided into three groups and who keep three types of
journals for ten weeks—and I’ll restate this in my own words—one where daily
the participants grumbled (describing what’s wrong in their lives), one where
they stated things without sorting out positive and negative, and a gratitude
journal where they simply noted what is positive in your life.

During this practice, he asked the participants to note
their subjective levels of happiness. In other words, how would they rate their
own happiness?His findings? In contrast to the other two journal keepers, participants
who kept the gratitude journal

“felt better about their lives as a whole and
were more optimistic about the future than participants in either of the other
control conditions.”

According to the scale he and his research team used,

“they
were a full 25% happier than the other participants.”

Gratitude results in happiness because we are designed to be
thankful.

Incidentally, John Templeton, the financier who later put
his money into engaging life’s “Big Questions”—like the relationship of
religion and science—had a very simple rule: start your day, immediately when
you wake up, by noting two things you’re thankful for. And as a result, I’m
told that Templeton, was an extraordinarily happy man.

Or maybe the word “extraordinarily” was ill-advised because
Emmons research suggests that any of us—even those not born with a “sunny”
disposition—can become happier through the practice of gratitude.

And this leads me to a question: if thanksgiving is fairly
directly related to happiness, then why aren’t we more thankful? Don’t we want to be happy?

With this question, we arrive at the greatest problem in our
culture, even though we probably have heard the commandment, “Thou shalt not
covet,” our whole consumption-based
society is founded on the idea that we can’t be thankful with what we’re given,
that we always need more. As much as I can enjoy the craft of advertising, I know that its
aim is increases our desires for what we don’t have. This makes it easy to be
thankless in our society—to complain, to mutter under our breath that we could
be happy “if only.” If only I had
more money, I could buy that car, which would drive me past a stunning beach
view, and I’d be accompanied by a beautiful person, who—because of car—would
be sitting next to me.

As the proverb describes it, money can’t buy happiness, and
I’d add this: wanting more money to buy more things positively makes us less
happy.

My own goal out of all this is to be thankful for what I am receiving and not
bitter for what I’m not receiving.

It seems that according to the science of gratitude, this
has some marked positive benefits.